With the growing popularity of networks that support cloud-based computing, monitoring network performance data and measuring traffic characteristics have become critical tasks in network management. Measuring path and traffic characteristics for a cloud network may be critical in resolving issues related to network load balancing and network scalability. For example, collecting and analyzing voice or video signal jitter characteristics and mean option score (MOS) values may provide quantitative and qualitative metrics helpful in managing voice and video traffic in the network.
MOS values and jitter characteristics may be collected using various methods. For example, the measurements may be collected using jitter probes. The probes may collect not only jitter characteristics and MOS values, but also impairment calculated planning impairment factor (ICPIF) data. The probes may also collect information about nodes accessibility, paths and links availability, loss of data packets, delay in delivering data packets, packet retransmission rate, and other network performance data.
Collecting network performance data may require injecting synthetic probe packets into a network and typically probe packets are sent on every network path to every network node. This may result in generating a large amount of probe traffic. Synthetic probes may be disseminated using network performance measurement tools such as Cisco IP Service Level Agreement (IPSLA) software, commercially available from Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif.
However, injecting a significant quantity of probes into a network may overload the network or may result in an excessive network bandwidth usage. Various problems may subsequently occur when the injected probes negatively impact the network performance or when the probe traffic exceeds the capacity of links or nodes.
Furthermore, entities responsible for managing synthetic probes, such as senders of the probes and recipients of the probes, may lack the ability to process transmitted data. For example, storing network performance data for numerous target nodes may require large storage facilities.
Moreover, due to the nature and abundance of network performance data, requesting, collecting and storing network performance data for each node in a network may be neither possible nor desirable. For example, some of the collected network performance data for some nodes may never be used, and therefore sending probe packets to obtain data from such nodes may be wasteful.